The lockdowns due to Covid-19 led to a sharp increase in hospitalizations of adolescents for severe anorexia. Though the clinical profile was typical, the investment of hospitalization and treatment was quite unusual. The investment of a space of one’s own enabled a resumption of boundary-work, restoring the differentiation between fantasy and reality, allowing a process of subjectal appropriation to resume, and putting at a distance the traumatic invasion and the oral regression provoked by the pandemic.
In France, The hospitalization of minors is governed by several legislative and statutory texts which emphasize that decisions about hospitalization and care belong to the holder of parental authority. However, they also assert the principle, in keeping with the international agreement concerning the rights of the child, of the necessity of the minor’s assent to care and the preservation, in specific cases, of medical confidentiality.
In France, for several years, special medical wards for adolescents have been created, whose targets are multiple : to evaluate the clinical situation, to contain the symptomatology, to bring an adapted answer and an appropriate treatment according to established diagnosis. This kind of ward, playing the part of substitute and containing agent, have to offer a transitional place in which the psychical workings of an adolescent will be able to spread, an adolescent who is looking for an external object it is possible to invest. Hospital staff meet with many difficulties (violence against others and oneself, work with the family, etc.) These wards have to define the treatment tool they represent and to their characteristics, their limits and their targets.
Adolescence, septembre 2002, 20, 3, 537-546
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7